Cloud infrastructure, including storage and processing, is an increasingly important resource for businesses and individuals. Using a cloud infrastructure enables businesses to outsource all or substantially all of their information technology (IT) functions to a cloud service provider. Businesses using a cloud service provider benefit from increased expertise supporting their IT function, higher capability hardware and software at lower cost, and ease of expansion (or contraction) of IT capabilities.
Monitoring a cloud infrastructure is an important function of cloud service providers, and continuity of function is an important selling point for cloud service providers. Downtime due to malware or other failures should be avoided to ensure customer satisfaction. Cloud infrastructure monitoring conventionally includes network packet sniffing, but this is impractical as a cloud infrastructure scales up. Alternatively, host-based systems conventionally collect and aggregate information regarding processes occurring within the host.